


Shine Razor Eyes

by Eisenschrott



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Death Troopers - Joe Schreiber
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Dubious Consent, F/M, Medical Examination, POV Alternating, Panic Attacks, Past Child Abuse, Premature Ejaculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:21:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28992849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eisenschrott/pseuds/Eisenschrott
Summary: For scrupulous doctor Zahara Cody and ruthless Imperial prison officer Jareth Sartoris, mutual hostility leads to an unexpected result.
Relationships: Zahara Cody/Jareth Sartoris
Kudos: 46





	1. Chapter 1

Sitting curled up on the bunk with the flimsi-thin sheet pulled up on her knees, Yuniu cocks her stark-white head at Zahara and makes a quick-fingered, plucking gesture. A moment later she stops, pondering. Then, she translates it into Basic Sign Language: _Am I very ill?_

Ten standard minutes into this bedside conversation, Zahara has already learned that Kallidahin body and sign language is more expressive than the galaxy has ever credited the mouthless aliens for. Large and sinewy and uncannily Human-like, Yuniu’s hands tremble as she signs the question. Her button-like black eyes bore into the Human doctor’s through a twinkle of lacrimation.

“I don’t think so.” Zahara glances down at her datapad, the results of standard tests she’s just run on Yuniu compared with average scores for her species. “You are a bit underfed, that’s all.” Owing to their ancestral maritime biology, Kallidahin absorb liquid nutrients through their facial membrane. The mess hall chow for General Population is neither nourishing nor liquid enough to meet this species’ requirements, and mealtime is too short for average Kallidahin feeding time. Zahara pictures the poor alien dunking her face into the plate, while her scientific mind calculates that Yuniu must have managed to eat less than a quarter of her recommended daily food intake over the past two months. “I’ll put you on a drip for a little while,” she points to the corner of the medbay she has turned into a lab, where Waste is rigging up the drip. “Is that okay?”

The trembling eight fingers move: _The food is bad on this ship_.

“I know.” If there’s one thing all sentients on the _Purge_ can agree on, guards and inmates alike, it is that the chow sucks. Zahara won’t miss it when she goes ashore for good. For her, it’s a matter of two standard weeks. For Yuniu and the other inmates, it is a safe assumption that their diet won’t be any better on the detention moon. “There’s nothing I can do about that, I’m afraid.”

Yuniu starts signing something non-Basic, stops mid-gesture. Zahara waits for her to repeat in BSL, but the Kallidahin doesn’t move. Her eyes are staring past Zahara, who now notices a change in the quiet of the medbay. There are five patients aside from Yuniu; Racham the Twi’lek smuggler and Shuhu the Pantoran bank robber are sedated, Harluss the Human splicer and Roope the Aleena art forger are awake and bunk neighbours, they were were playing sabacc between themselves while Zahara visited Yuniu. Behind her back, Zahara has heard the quick rustle on the bunks, the silence without the soft papery flip of the cards.

She turns around and the slate-grey of an Imperial Corrections Officer’s uniform draws her eyes toward the entrance of the medbay. Her heart makes a leap even before she realises it’s Captain Sartoris.

A black hole opens up on the spot where he stands, pulling light in so that all the eyes in the medbay are on his straight-backed, tight-fisted figure. And his pale-ice eyes stare back. They lock on Zahara.

He rises one hand and flicks his index and middle finger in a come-here motion, managing to make even that look like a threat.

The first feeling is a chill tingling down her neck and her spine, bristling hair up in its wake. By instinct, her body shifts its weight on her behind foot, ready to step backward.

Anger, pride and defiance kick in a second later, locking her jaw in what she hopes is a tough face and giving her legs the spring they need to march briskly up to Sartoris. “Do you require medical assistance, Captain?” Zahara’s tone implies: _If you don’t, get out of my medbay_.

His retort is a low rumble, through lips that barely move, “Don’t fucking broadcast it to the cons, you idiot.”

The harsh language is a surprise, more so than an affront. Sartoris is a creep of the civil sort. This is the first time she hears him utter a swear word. The whiff of his breath, too, is strange. Acrid. Bilious. The rest of him gives off that smell of freshly sweated gaberwool she has learned to know well from her own uniform, and which the prison barge’s laundry units are woefully unequipped to wash off.

Sartoris mutters on, “I felt sick on the job. You have to send your medidroid up to my quarters.”

Zahara blinks. “Sick how?” Not that his entire job—and his way of carrying it out—isn’t inherently sickening, but if the smell of vomit in his breath is any indication, the mess hall chow might have just made another victim.

“ _Quiet_ , Doctor.” His eyes dart to the occupied bunks. Zahara quashes an impulse to stand in the way of Sartoris’ stare, shielding the patients. His voice drops even lower, “I thought I was having a stroke. For the rest of this shift it’s been like a Hammerhead corvette had rammed my skull. I need your droid to get a look at me somewhere private and make sure I’m not dropping dead.”

“That’s what being admitted to the medbay is for.” Zahara cannot help but speak quietly in return. However, she is _not_ intimidated by him. This is just respecting the patient’s desire for privacy, and making sure he won’t go after the other patients and bully them into—eternal—silence.

His face is an inexpressive mask of precociously deep-furrowed skin, a common symptom of a lifelong spacefaring career with insufficient protection against cosmic rays. But his nostrils flare as he exhales through his nose, a barely audible hiss that sends another chill down Zahara’s spine. “A medbay full of cons. Are you really too dense to get why they better not see the captain of the guards being weak?”

“It… it’s never a problem for the other guards.”

“My quarters. Send the droid.” Sartoris leans his face closer to Zahara’s, blowing the tart stench of his breath straight to her nose. “And think up a plausible excuse. If you fink on me with the scum here, all of you are dead meat.” He turns and stalks off, leaving behind a faint, stomach-churning scent of male smell and vomit that maybe is all etched inside Zahara’s nose.

She stares at him as the door slides open and closed behind him, then at the door, her body stiff and her mind whirling in a screechy emotion she can’t call either fear or fury. One of her med school textbooks pops up in her memories, the Human psychology manual, the datapad displaying a paragraph about common emotional and physical reactions to violence. _Dead meat_. Next comes Von Longo’s bashed-in, bloodied pulp of a face, and that instant she had wondered in amazement and horror before starting to medicate the mess, _How is he not dead yet?_

“Dr Cody?” Waste’s vocoderised tone jolts her back to reality. The 2-1B droid has walked up to her, standing at a respectful meter-and-a-half distance, and she didn’t hear a whirr of his servomotors. “I applied the intravenous line to Yuniu, as you requested.”

She tries to smile through the sudden quick-march tempo of her heartbeat. “Good lad that you are.”

“According to the medical literature in my memory banks, the solution I have prepared is not ideal for Kallidahin physiology, but it is, as you organics would say, making the best of the means we have.”

“As one does.”

Waste’s photoreceptors look at her as if he’s expecting orders, but before Zahara can say anything, he speaks up, “Did Captain Sartoris require assistance?”

 _Send up the droid, or you’re all dead meat_. “Clearly not,” she says, loud enough for the other inmates to overhear and to assume the bastard has just nipped over to keep on their toes the doctor he has beef with and the cons for the hells of it, typical Imperial scare tactics. Now she should switch to a hush, tell the droid to revise Captain Sartoris’ past medical history file and head to the guards’ quarters. She draws a deep breath, her mouth opens—and she clacks it shut. _Up yours, Captain_ , her wishful thinking speaks with the Corellian twang that colours her voice when she has too much to drink. _I don’t take orders and I don’t take threats from you_. She instructs Waste to run some routine check on the sedated patients, which the droid springs to carry out with the slightest half-second of hesitation.

She goes to sit at the medbay computer terminal and pulls up Sartoris’ file from the databank. Neither bookkeeping nor honesty were her predecessor’s strong suit; mortality statistics have been deflated, epidemic outbreaks left unidentified, all violent deaths ascribed to rows among inmates and none to the Corrections Officers and the guard detail stormtroopers. Zahara won’t miss any of this. Civilian hospitals aren’t this bad, at least in the Core; especially the well-funded private clinics for the affluent, where her parents can put in a good word for her with the head physician. Heaving a quiet sigh to herself, she reads through the file.

He has never had heart problems, doesn’t smoke, no substance addiction, no known allergies. All vaccinations are up to date; most disease screenings are outdated, but that is a recurring problem among the ICOs—the Imperial armed forces have no use for the sick and no patience to treat them when it’s so much cheaper to replace them, so a serious illness means discharge; the guards aren’t keen on losing their job. Minor surgeries to treat blaster, vibroblade and blunt trauma injuries. Occasional prescription of mild painkillers to treat headache. The family history section is blank.

Out of sheer curiosity, she reads through the end of the file to the psych profile, even though she knows the information that actually matter, the VHB scores and incident reports, aren’t accessible without the warden’s authorisation. A grand total of two words is written down in the viewable section: _Mild claustrophobia_. That’s two more than Zahara expected to find, and she raises an eyebrow. It isn’t unusual, for Humans who work long hauls on starships, to develop an aversion to closed spaces. Still, of all the places for a claustrophobic sentient to spend his life in, a crammed prison barge sounds like a peculiarly poor choice. It suits Sartoris.

Zahara closes the file and considers her options, fidgeting the drum of the stethoscope hanging over her shoulders. It doesn’t take her long. Her training and the experience she has gained on the _Purge_ has taught her the value of quick thinking.

She goes to one of the supply cupboards in the back of the medbay and grabs a field analysis portable kit. Waste stands aside in a pose that, through sheer stillness and the immutable expression on the droid’s faceplate, manages to convey utter puzzlement.

“The warden wants me to go and check on the prisoners down in solitary. Hold the fort for a little while,” she tells him, feeling bad for lying to the poor clanker.

“Of course, Dr Cody,” his metallic droning voice carrying a long-suffering, almost parental implication: _Of course, meatbag, just scurry around this tin can full of scum while I am here taking the job seriously_. Roope and Harluss have resumed their card game; as she passes by their bunks, the Aleena says, “Careful down there, Doc.”

“Always am, Roope.”

“Ya heard that, bald momong?” Zahara hears him jeer at Harluss. “She remembers my name.” She is already too far to decipher the Axxilan profanities Harluss grumbles in response. Ribbing the opponent is part of the game, and she reasonably trusts these two inmates not to come to blows.

Nevertheless, the sooner this is over and she returns to the medbay, the better.

She makes her way to the guards’ quarters and sighs in relief as she finds the gangway empty there. The end of the current watch is standard hours away, so most of the guards are either in Gen Pop earning their daily polystarch bread, or asleep in their bunks. She takes care of treading as lightly as the durasteel floor and her boots allow. She has no wish to wake any of the resting men, nor to answer lewd questions about what’s she doing here all alone, has the missus finally tired of the clankers and the scum? Least of all to swat groping hands off.

She stops in front of Captain Sartoris’ quarters. Deep breath. Her right fist clenches the handle of the porta-kit. With her left, she knocks. The door slides open faster than she expected, giving her no time to repress a startled flinch.

Sartoris stares at her as he stands in the doorway, his eyes widening on his otherwise stony face. His uniform tunic is off; dark patches of perspiration stain the white undershirt on the chest and under the armpits. The gamy smell of his sweat mixes with the chemical whiff of laundry unit detergent.

“Where’s the droid?” His voice is a low, threat-laden growl. She supposes she should be glad he isn’t shouting, rallying the other guards, but being alone with a _quiet_ threat does not feel any better.

Zahara ignores the hair standing on the back of her head and the leg muscles tensing, ready to turn around and run. She returns Sartoris’ glare in kind. “Busy.”

“Then get back to your medbay and send up the droid. You can swap places.” His right hand reaches for the door lock; Zahara raises a foot and, when the door slides to close, she blocks it. The door stutters to a standstill, pushing against the sole of her left boot. Sartoris bares more teeth. She keeps holding his glare, the silence only broken by the huffing noise of the door mechanism. “Pushing me and slamming the door in my face,” she anticipates what he must be thinking, “won’t make me send the droid, either.”

He works his jaw. It occurs to Zahara this is the most expressive she’s ever seen Sartoris. “Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asks, leaning forward into her personal space, again wafting the words in her face like smoke from a cheap cigarette. He must have brushed his teeth, the stench of vomit is far less pungent, but a wave of nausea still rolls over Zahara. “I know you can’t stand me. Come on, girl, stop making it difficult for both of us.”

He isn’t wrong. She is at a loss for words, just for a moment. “You are the one being difficult, Captain. And if you don’t let me in now, I’m comming the warden.” The irony, she thinks. Threatening a murderous bully in uniform with the authority of a higher-ranking bully in uniform.

But it works.

Sartoris clams up into his usual thin-lipped, dead-eyed sabacc face, and steps back. Zahara steps in, her left foot achy, and the door slides shut behind her.

His quarters are as much of a poorly lit, boxy dump as anyone’s on the admin level of the _Purge_. The place is tidier than the guards whose quarters Zahara has visited during sanitisation procedures, if by ‘tidier’ one means a complete lack of any personal touch in the furniture: no Twi’lek pin-up or Imperial propaganda holoposter, no family holos, no religious icons. Discarded at the foot of the made bunk, there’s a lump of fabric that has to be his tunic, next to the boots and the dirty-white footwraps hanging from the shoes’ padded collars.

Sartoris skulks barefoot to the centre of the room and stares her up, crossing his arms over his chest. “I was down in solitary, about three standard hours ago,” he cuts her off before she can draw the breath to ask questions. “Went to check inside a maintenance shaft. All of a sudden, my head starts spinning and it’s like somebody’s strangling me. Heart beats so fast I think it’s about to go off like a thermal detonator. I stumbled out of the shaft and next thing I know, I’m on my knees puking up breakfast, shaking and sweating like I’m running a high fever. I know what you’re about to say, and no, it wasn’t food poisoning. My stomach was just fine ‘til that moment, and I’m experienced enough to tell when the chow’s spoiled _before_ I eat it.”

“More power to you. Did you have chest pain?”

“I did.”

“And did it spread to your left arm and shoulder?”

He ponders for a moment. “No.” His speech and face musculature sound and seem fine; of that, he has given ampler proof than Zahara even needed.

“Did you feel like you were going crazy? Or dissociated?”

He tilts his head, watching her like she is the one going crazy.

“Look,” she says, “you said it happened when you were in a tight, confined space, right? And your medical file says you have a phobia of closed spaces.”

“Which means I’m fine and that was all a big scare, huh?”

“Well, actually—”

“I like the sound of that.” He treats her to a humourless smile, fading immediately. “I still have one Huttfucker of a headache. The old doctor used to give me painkillers. Worked well enough.”

“Is it the first time you—”

“First in a long while, that’s all you need to know.” He walks up to her and grips her shoulder, wheeling her toward the door. “Be a nice girl and get me those pills.”

Zahara might just spontaneously combust here and now. He would be treating her with more respect if she were that unprofessional loser who preceded her as the _Purge_ ’s medcorpsman, or if she were a droid. She tears his hand off her shoulder. Doesn’t let go of it, pulls his arm straight parallel to the ground. “Hold your arm like this, Captain. I need to measure your blood pressure.”

“You just said I’m fine.” He tries to wrench himself free, but like most men on this barge, he likely has never imagined she has a daily workout routine and lifts dumbbells.

Zahara holds his arm in place. The smell from his armpit makes her eyes water. “I didn’t. You assumed what was most convenient for you.”

Sartoris stops struggling; a frown replaces his apathetic perma-gaze. She has the distinct impression he’s considering whether beating her to death is worth the hassle. “Hurry up,” he mumbles at last, and Zahara exhales, not realising until now she has been holding her breath. Her palms, one clenching the handle of the porta-kit and the other Sartoris’ wrist, are both clammy with cold sweat.

She opens the porta-kit, pulls out the sphygmomanometer and latches it around his upper arm. He glares at the sensor monitor as if to warn it that if it dares show an hypertension result, he’s going to hurl it in the trash compactor. And the sphygmomanometer is intimidated into beeping a cheerful green, displaying values within the norm for a male Human of his age and weight.

He straps off the sensor himself and flicks it back at Zahara. “You’re happy now?”

She should be. There is enough evidence to exclude a stroke. Enough evidence to leave him to rot here. Assume the most convenient course of action for her. Zahara swallows hard. “I need to examine you a bit more to be sure.”

Sartoris pinches his temples. “Kriffing son of a Hutt,” he mutters, Zahara isn’t sure whether he’s referring to her or to the headache.

“Take your shirt off and lie down on your back, Captain.”

His head perks up, upper lip curled up and baring his teeth in a feral expression. “What?”

Rolling her eyes, Zahara pulls the stethoscope off her shoulders and slots the earpieces inside her ears. “The sooner we get on with this, the sooner I will be gone. Bunch up the pillow and put it under your shoulders.”

Sartoris hesitates a few seconds, then stomps to the bunk, whips his shirt off and tosses it against the bulkhead, with enough force that Zahara hears the balled-up garment thump through the ambient noise dampening effect of the earpieces. He glares lightsabers at her as he lowers himself on the mattress, his every movement slow and circumspect, as if he were waiting for the right moment to lunge at her and strike out.

It takes her a few uneasy seconds to will her legs into motion and walk up to the bunk; in the back of her mind, a little prey animal hurries to calculate the escape trajectory from the bunk to the door. Sartoris does not lose sight of her for an instant, his pale eyes almost shining above the sharp cheekbones.

She stands over him by the bedside, giving his undressed upper body a preliminary look. Light conditions are not ideal, but clear enough to not show any skin-deep anomaly—except for a scar on the midsection and another above the left hip, unmistakable reminders of years-old blaster burns. The skin is very fair, covered in a sheen of sweat that pastes the thin dark hair to his pectorals; his every breath heaves and hollows out his abdomen. Zahara places the porta-kit on the bedside chest of drawers and inwardly thanks her inmates for having provided her with ample practice in ignoring body odours; despite the pungent assault of Sartoris’ perspiration on her nostrils, she does not grimace.

Still, knowing who the man is suffices to make the mess hall chow slowly breaking down in her stomach toss around. She pushes through a momentary hesitation of her own in palpating for the apex beat. As soon as her palm presses the moist, cold skin of his left pectoral, Sartoris cringes with an angry, hissing sound that sounds non-Human. Non-sentient, even. “Relax, Captain,” she snaps, her usual soothing bedside manners be damned.

“Why can’t you just use a scanner?” The panicked edge cracking his gravelly voice makes Zahara raise an eyebrow.

“Same reason why you wear footwraps instead of socks. This is a prison barge, not a medical frigate.” As in, a vessel whose cargo is not merely expendable, but supposed to be worn-out to death by hard labour, and overseen by guards who aren’t exactly the 501st Legion. In the Empire’s opinion, it is already doing them a huge, undeserved favour by shelling out credits for cheap and outdated medical supplies. “We make do with the tools we have.”

He works his jaw. Zahara braces herself for a bite. Very, very quietly, she exhales in relief as Sartoris mutters something the earpieces block off, except for the word _akk-bitch_ , and sinks back on the bunk; if stares could pierce durasteel, his would blast a meter-wide crater through the ceiling.

Fighting the hesitation again—instinctive fear or moral disgust, she doesn’t even want to know—she presses her left hand to the side of his neck, and the drum of the stethoscope to his chest. She already knows that Jareth Sartoris is a heartless bastard in the figurative sense but, in the literal sense, the man packs an entire Star Destroyer’s worth of artillery inside his ribcage.

A new emotion worms its way under her medical professionalism, as well as under her dislike for this specific patient. A warm one, itching to move, making the side of her hand that brushes under Sartoris’ chin take notice of the stubble just starting to regrow, and her eyes flick over the man’s body, lither than it appears in uniform, as she listens to its roaring interior.

Piqued curiosity.


	2. Chapter 2

Dr Cody shifts her free hand to Jareth’s wrist, then lets go after entirely too many, uncomfortable seconds. The stethoscope slides to a different angle on his chest, its smooth metal surface reminding his skin of the flat of a blade.

“Breathe normally,” says Cody, without so much a hint of the gentleness she dispenses to convict patients. “Deep and hold it for a few seconds.”

He hadn’t even realised he was beginning to hyperventilate again. Just continuing the trend of this Sithspit of a day, hammering home the point that he exerts but an unsteady control over his own body. That lack of self-awareness, and Cody chiding him for that, unnerves him. “What does that matter? It’s my heart that’s the problem, isn’t it?”

A flash of anger, matching his own, scrunches up her girl-next-door face, accentuating the furrows that start to cut into her tan skin. “ _I_ will tell you what the problem is. Just stay still.”

“Don’t try giving me orders.”

She keeps her hard eyes down on his chest. Jareth can’t tell if he has shut her up for good, or she’s dismissing him like a bothersome youngling throwing a tantrum; he has a hunch it’s the latter rather than the former. The stethoscope pressure points draw a curve from the area around his left nipple to the top of his sternum, then retrace it in the reverse direction. He winces as the drum presses to his neck, left side, right side, where the carotids pulse. He can give an accurate estimate of how fast a Human of his size blacks out from oxygen deprivation when those spots are put in a chokehold.

“Sit up a bit,” she says. Her warm hand on his shoulder stops him at the suitable height. The stethoscope travels back to the centre of his chest. “Breathe in deep and out. Hold it. Now breathe normally.” He recalls one of the many enlightened conversations among his men at the mess hall, a while ago—Vesek and Austin going back and forth like a stand-up comedy duo, for the meal’s whole duration, over what body parts, in any sentients of any gender and species, Dr Cody is most into. “Alright. Now lean down to your left.”

He obeys, facing the bulkhead and the crumpled, stinking heap of fabric that his shirt has been reduced to.

“Breathe in and out and hold it.” Cody reaches down with the stethoscope around his nipple and toward the armpit. In that cramped space, the smell of his sweat is acrid enough that she wrinkles her nose for a split second. That would amuse him, had his body not developed a sudden hyperawareness to her warm presence hovering just above his naked skin, and the firm, soft volume of her breasts brushing against his right arm. His cock stiffens just enough to add a minor, snug discomfort to the day’s list.

Cody pulls back. He lies back upright, locking his eyes into hers. “Tell me one thing, Doctor.”

“Yes?” Cody slips the stethoscope earpieces off and hangs the tool to her neck.

His mouth curls up into a smirk. “I was wondering if you’d enjoy examining me better if I had a big fat pair of tits.”

Her eyebrows shoot up, then go down in a galaxy-weary frown. “That reminds me, when’s your next tumour screening due?”

“No judgment here, Doctor. I know well I’m not much to your liking.” On the other hand, to him, her blatant loathing feels… well, not quite pleasant, but grounding. A welcome reassurance, after his brain spent several Force-awful minutes locked in derealisation. His smirk widens. “Do you prefer Human tits or xeno-anatomy? There’s a betting pool going on, you know, and I wouldn’t say no to easy credits.” Jareth doesn’t give a kriff about his men’s betting pools, that are more for conjuring up wanking material than for winning money none of them has. The flush spreading to Cody’s face, her jaw tightening as she stems outrage in, are all the reward he needs to collect.

She pushes his arms up and gathers his wrists behind the nape of his neck against the bulkhead. “Stay still like this.” She sets her hands flat on his outstretched torso and gives his pectorals a hard squeeze.

Jareth tenses up against an urge to buck, digging his heels into the blanket as a hot twitch runs across his lower abdomen and down his rapidly swelling cock. Sithspit, he’s underestimated how touch-starved his body is. _Badly_ underestimated. In his years of service, he’s met younger guards with faces like Iegoan angels he shoved between his legs, and muscular stormtroopers on whose lap he ground himself, but most of his battle honours—ICO Vesek’s wording—come from hurried visits at Armed Forces Auxiliary Relief brothels in-between hauls. Some ended in punch-ups with Navy dandies who’d gotten haughty at the _Imperial Corruptions Officers_ , or tried to kick him and his boys out altogether.

“Does it hurt?” Cody asks, genuine surprise—concern, perhaps—taking a bit of edge off her hostility.

Jareth groans. “Girl, you’re making me hard.”

She says nothing. Pointedly doesn’t look down at his groin. But her hands, so warm and soft on his cold-bristling skin, do not stop. Her fingers massage hard circles into the flesh and down to the flat muscles, press and pinch his nipples feeling for the tissue underneath. What’s worst—nine hells, Jareth likes it. His heart bolts, his mouth fills with saliva he struggles to swallow, his cock throbs and the raising tip strains against the fly of his trousers. He tries to roll his hips and position himself into a less aggravating angle, but that just makes the friction stronger. When Cody releases him, he exhales a hissing, shaky breath that makes his back arc, while his brain supplies feverish images of the woman’s tongue fluttering over his hardened nipples, trailing down to his belly and past the waistband of his trousers.

“Congratulations, Captain.” Her expression is a mask of cold annoyance and reddened cheeks. “You do not have breast cancer.”

“Yeah? Sorry to disappoint.” At her quizzical look, the smirk reappears on his flushing face. “The only way in the galaxy you’d like me is if I were a goner lying on one of your medbay bunks. If I fessed up my very own sob stories to you, bet we’d be eating face in a second. Trust me, Doctor, I’ve got ‘em in spades.”

“You experienced trouble breathing today, didn’t you?”

His smirk dies down. “…I did.”

“Sit up. I have to listen to your lungs,” she says in the tone of a rookie guard ordered to mop up a flooded ‘fresher because all the maintenance droids were unavailable.

Jareth sits up and scoots over to the centre of the bunk, legs spread awkwardly wide. Cody sits behind him, so close that her breath tickles the back of his shoulders. He shivers under the sensation, and the shiver travels all the way down to culminate in another painful twinge. He rubs his hands on his thighs, resisting the filthy impulse to palm himself through his trousers. When the drum of the stethoscope presses onto the skin to the top right side of his spine, he throws his head back and moans behind gritted teeth.

“Captain, stay still!” Cody blurts out. The nervousness and the slight tremor in her voice don’t go amiss. Jareth wonders if the barge’s life support system have malfunctioned and cranked the temperature in the room up several degrees. The body just mere centimetres behind him feels as hot as a star; a waft of warm air feathers his nape, “I need you to not move. And breathe normally, through your mouth. Can you handle that?”

“Yes.” Jareth hears the strain in his own voice. Barely suppresses a flinch as the stethoscope makes its way down his back. His breathing doesn’t sound normal in the least; he may have a few gross habits of his own but breathing through his mouth, let alone panting and slobbering like a strill, are not among them.

Then, her fingers press on his lower back, just above his waistband. He sucks in a ragged breath and forces himself not to buck his pelvis. “That’s… not where my lungs are, Doctor.”

“But that’s where a sacral oedema might be.”

Whatever in the nine hells _that_ is. Jareth wonders if she’s bantha-shitting him with made-up medical techno-babble. Wouldn’t be the first story he gets word of about a MedCorps officer scaring their patient into lying down quiet and still and be assaulted.

Her touch slides up his spine. He feels her fingers fan out on his skin, tracing patterns—scar lines, he realises with a shudder. Not just the blaster burns and vibroblade gashes a string of Imperial medidroids have patched up with cheap synthskin, but the old ones, too. Barely visible keloid prints he’s carried since as far as his earliest childhood memories stretch, a fog through which only the sound of his own cries and the unremitting, battering pain emerge.

“How did you get these?” Cody asks in a low purr of sympathy.

Fury wells up in his chest, a hot crackle of emotion that the idiot meat in his underpants reacts to with a painful twinge. He spins ‘round, blindly grabs Cody’s forearms and, before she has the time even to yelp, yanks her onto the mattress, hard enough that her temple thump on the bulkhead, and pins her at an awkward half-sitting, half-lying angle under him. His cock is mashed by his own weight onto her hip, and when he tries to crawl into a less uncomfortable position, he finds himself wedged between her legs. Right where she’s hottest and wet— _no, you idiot, that’s you, you’re leaking in your underwear, you Huttfucking idiot_.

She shakes her head and blinks, then gapes at him, her pretty face stupid and incredulous. She writhes to shake him off, but can’t budge him.

Jareth bares his teeth. “Told you I’ve… I’ve got my sob stories, Doc. But I’m not one of your precious cons…” He swallows, just before his voice cracks into a sigh. “…out to get you hot and bothered with pity. You aren’t getting the sob stories from me. What—what you get is…” He thrusts his hips forward. Damp tenting fabric rubs against the softness between her legs. Once, twice, a third that ends in a throb making his breath catch—he struggles to stop, to keep his eyes open and focussed on her face.

There is not a trace of fear or submissiveness on it. “Jareth, if you don’t put on a condom _now_ , I’m going to scream so loud they’ll hear all the way down to solitary.”


	3. Chapter 3

Zahara sucks in a trembling breath. Her heart feels like it is about to burst out of her chest and her arms like a rancor is plucking them off the shoulder sockets. Sweat flows on her forehead and under her uniform, bitingly cold in contrast with the fiery pain of her forearms in Sartoris’ steely grip, and the heat that has built up in her lower belly.

She grits her teeth and looks straight into his narrowed, hormone-glazed reptilian eyes, steeling herself for a punch to the face— _mouth shut, tongue in, jaw clenched, and roll with the blow_ ; not part of any training at Rhinnal med school or MedCorps basic training, but a trick an inmate patient has explained to her, in an attempt to flaunt his manliness. She tries not to picture her face crushed to a bloody pulp like Von Longo’s. Would _that_ even be enough for the warden to sack this violent piece of Human garbage, at long last?

Sartoris stays still for a few seconds. _Almost_ still. Even through their clothes, she can sense his sex twitch. “I wouldn’t scream if I were you.” The grip on her forearms relents and he heaves himself up on his haunches, his thin mouth puckered and eyes squeezed shut; the bulge between his legs, in all likelihood, does not appreciate the motion.

Now is a good time to swing her foot and kick him there.

“The other ICOs…” Sartoris drags himself to his feet and totters toward the ‘fresher cubicle. “They would be the first to hear you and come to check.”

Now is a good time to make a dash for the door.

“I’m sure,” he says from inside the cubicle, as he rummages in the cupboard with a visibly shaking hand, “you can imagine how well that’d turn out for you.”

Zahara remains where she is, pulling the pillow into a more comfortable position and taking the stethoscope off her neck—thank the stars it did not break when Sartoris has flung himself on top of her.

Inside the ‘fresher, he rips a small, square sachet open with his teeth, steadying himself with a hand gripping the edge of the sink.

Now is her last chance to run.

Zahara unzips her trousers. Sartoris looks up at that small noise, and they watch each other as they both pull their trousers and underpants down to the ankles. She bites her lower lip at the sting of the cool, recycled air on her damp labia. He hisses out an animal sound of relief as the average-sized erection bobs free, slips the condom on and stumbles out of the clothes at his feet.

She lies back and spreads her legs as wide as the tangle of fabric allows. Sartoris climbs on the bed, on all fours with his knees between hers, his frame blocking out the light and filling her nostrils with musky acridness that makes her stomach churn and the muscles in her pelvic floor clench. “I gave you a golden chance to bolt,” his voice growls into her ear, a ragged breath with the burnt smell of mess hall caf tickling her cheek. “And you wasted it. You’re even more stupid than I thought.”

His right hand snakes under her uniform top and the undershirt below, calloused skin on her belly and on her breasts, hard squeezes that crumple her bra and hurt, but her squeal of pain morphs into a keening sound. His mouth slams onto hers and his tongue pushes in so deep it almost triggers her gag reflex. Instinctively she plants her hands on his chest, nails in the skin that feel like they could stab all the way down to the pummelling heart underneath, but as soon as his body senses that resistance, it presses flat atop her, hips shoving back and forth, the tip of his cock rubbing her sex in blind, exasperatingly off-target motions.

Zahara bites onto his tongue, hard enough to draw a coppery tang of blood and make him yowl. Sartoris breaks the kiss and for a few pounding heartbeats they lie panting, struggling with fluttering eyelids to glare at each other.

“Fuck you, crazy akk-bitch,” Sartoris wheezes. Then winces, as Zahara hitches her legs around his hips.

“Yes, Jareth. _Fuck me_.”

He yanks his right hand off her breast, leaving her top bunched up like a poor imitation of a compression bandage. She feels his fingers on her folds, finding the slick, open way in, two _thick_ fingers pushing in without giving her time to adjust, and a whimper rises and chokes on her lips when the fingers retreat and his cock thrusts in.

White-hot pain crackles up her spine, the sort of which she imagines a pelvic fracture feels like. She sobs, but he starts pounding, too fast, too mindless even to use his hands—fisted on the coverlet—on her body, his hoarse gasps trickling drool in the crook of her neck.

“Doc… I’m…” Sartoris’ voice breaks into a strangled cry; his body shudders and stiffens, his swollen cock pulsates inside her. Then, he collapses like a sack of pallies, his dead weight knocking the wind out of Zahara’s lungs.

Eyes to the ceiling, she waits. Nothing happens. He just lies on her, gulping air in, and her muscles contract around an unresponsive, softening lump.

His face has landed, with the right cheek down, on her shoulder. Zahara cants her head. “You bastard, was that _all_?” Her own irritation surprises her.

For a couple seconds, Sartoris is the living, shaky-breathing, gaping-mouthed and wide-eyed picture of defeat. He stinks like he has run a marathon through the _Purge_ from admin to bottom levels and back. His jaw shakes and works his features into a snarl. “What, you forgot that Human men get to the point faster than women? You’ve been kriffing too many aliens.”

It is Zahara’s turn to gape. Her cheeks go up in flames, a flurry of insults and denial bubble up to her mouth in a formless splutter—which makes Sartoris’ snarl twist into that infuriating, vicious grin again—and her sex clenches harder.

He shifts and props his upper body up, off her, on his elbows. Zahara’s hands shoot up, the left around his waist, the right clutching his hair. “Where the hells do you think you’re going?”

“To—to take a shower.”

A growl escapes Zahara’s front teeth and lips, as she crosses her ankles over his arse and pushes him closer, rolling her hips hard onto the flaccid piece of flesh inside her.

“Stupid dune-cow, I can’t—” He’s pushed facedown for Zahara’s mouth to seal his up; her tongue sweeps over his teeth, rough with fillings, coated with a tang of bile and caf, mixed with a dusty overpaint of fleet-issue toothpaste which has done nothing to scrub the grossness off. Exactly what she’s always expected Jareth Sartoris’ kiss to taste like.


	4. Chapter 4

Jareth is too dumbstruck to whimper into Zahara’s kiss, deep like a dental check, hard and demanding, even as it blocks off his breathing and the twitching, sweeping motions of her tongue against the roof of his mouth reawaken his gag reflex.

Her arms tighten around his upper body and her legs around his waist, the hard heels of her boots pressing into his naked arse, her fingertips sliding down his back along the scar lines, nails raking fiery trails of pain. Rationally he knows it is nothing, compared to the beatings that etched those lines into his skin, a lifetime ago. But he cannot help his skin crawling, the sickening dizziness that has gripped his head after the climax, his galloping heart bottling up his throat until he has to make a conscious effort to breathe. When Zahara abruptly breaks the kiss—with a soft growl, what in _hells_ —and her mouth clamps itself on his neck like a drooling mynock to a power cable, Jareth exhales with a sobbing noise, between _no_ and _oof_.

Her right hand slithers down to the crevice of his arse, squeezes his buttock as if to exact vengeance for the way he’s treated her tits, then winds down his flank and burrows between their bodies where they rub together the closest.

“Listen, I’ve spent up my power cell for this round so even if you…” Jareth realises she is not touching him, but herself. Just a few centimetres higher on her cunt than where his cock is still jacked into it, lying limp while around it her muscles clamp and loosen, clamp and loosen. Her knuckles tickle his belly. And she has started rocking her hips again.

Blood rushes to his face—not to his cock; all comm channels down there are going to maintain strict radio silence for more embarrassing minutes than Jareth has ever cared to admit to himself. In A.F.A.R. houses, it’s cheaper to get the deed done fast; there are endurance pills available, and a saga of tongue-in-cheek jokes has developed aboard the _Purge_ about Warden Kloth’s rumoured usage of those, but in Jareth’s informed opinion, no thirty-standard-minutes long fuck is worth three standard days of auratic migraine.

He flinches as teeth nibble his neck, right where his carotid artery pulsates like a distress signal beacon. Then Zahara’s lips release that spot with a soft smack and attach themselves to the ball of his shoulder. Her free hand roams up and down his back, scratching and palming its way across his clinical history of blunt and penetrating trauma. “Doc, you’re getting off on it?”

“Shut up,” she hisses back.

“You’re not right in your head.”

“And you’re one to talk.”

Well, _that_ is true, what with his recurring headaches and everything his psych profile says is crooked since the first Veq-Headley test he took.

Not that the writhing mynock here is all that better. A cute, rich Human girl who holes herself up on a prison barge and gets friendly with alien criminals has got to have issues. Like the ICOs who buy or blackmail fucks from non-humanoid cons—not normal aliens like Twi’leks or Zabraks, but the bloody weird ones.

Zahara’s thrusts grow stronger, her breathing faster. He can smell her sweat and her cunt, through his own stink and the laundry-soap hint of her uniform. A sweet scent that reminds him of canned meiloorun from the mess hall, the brief instant when an aroma that retains some semblance of actual fruit wafts out of the open can. Jareth tries to picture his men’s faces if they could see him and her now, and fails, as if imagining they could peer into his night cycle dreams. She thrusts upward hard, a couple times, panting; his body bounces up, propelled by hers, until they are half-sat against the pillow and the bulkhead, his knees chafing against the coverlet.

“Girl, you’re crazy.”

Zahara keeps moving and keeps panting. She doesn’t spare him even a glance in response.

_You’re crazy. Fucking someone like me._

Jareth’s hands crawl their hesitant way to her hips, speckled with small moles. The pressure on his still impassive cock is getting uncomfortable, and a wave of nausea rolls over him as he thinks of the filthy condom it is encased in.

Mercifully, it doesn’t take long for Zahara to come. Her hand on his back skids to a halt, nails digging into skin, and she lets out a viscera-deep exhalation, hot and thick against his cooling skin like a beam of hyperdrive engine radiation. A soaked fist of muscle squeezes him to the point it hurts, and it relents just a split sec before he can’t take it anymore.

With eyes closed, Zahara flops back against the bulkhead, her hands sliding to the sides of her body.

Jareth grabs her chin. “If you fall asleep, I’m kicking you out of here, nude as you are.”

Her front teeth nips at his finger.

He pulls himself up and off of her, in a queasy, squelching noise and an explosion of smell. Her juices have gotten all over the upper inside of his thighs and the hair above his cock. Jareth sits on the bedside and starts peeling the sodden latex biohazard off, trying not to look and not to touch with more fingertips than the strict necessary.

Behind him, Zahara moves. So she was not falling asleep. First bloody show of a minimum of good sense—

“Don’t throw that away, Captain.”

Good sense his afterburners. “What the…?”

Zahara reaches for her medkit box and produces a sampling tube. “I need it for a spermiogram. You don’t want to know how many infections it can expose.”

“You should’ve worried about that before you spread your legs.” Jareth grimaces as the condom goes off; he almost drops it as he pinches it between forefinger and thumb, and hands it to Zahara. “Bet it’ll be some non-Human balls-rot _you_ have just infected me with.”

“If only my sex life were as interesting as you guards fantasize it is.” She seals the waste inside the tube, which she buries back in the box. Then she gropes around, picks up a crumpled rag—his dirty shirt, Jareth realises—and wipes herself between her legs.

Flush bursts again over his cheeks and neck. “You gross bastard, I have to wear that!” But instead of ripping the abused rag off her hand, he just watches. Now, of all times, his cock gives a lazy twitch of reawakening.

The shirt lands in his face, the smell more palpable than the fabric.

“It was overdue for the laundry unit anyway.” She gets to her feet, tugs her tunic down, her underpants and trousers up. A quick zipping, a few tugs to smooth the kinks on her clothes, the stethoscope slung over her shoulders, and Dr Cody is back to normal. “Your heart and your lungs sound fine. Your blood pressure seems normal, too. But I suggest cutting back on caf for a few days.”

“Not going to happen. When am I getting my headache pills?”

“Jareth, in a perfect galaxy I would have referred you to a psychiatrist yesterday.” She shrugs. “Have you ever taken antidepressants?”

“For what? A dizzy spell now and then?”

“That _dizzy spell_ you had today was a panic attack, you idiot.”

His turn to shrug. “Well, it’s gone now. Only happens once in a while.” _But what if it starts happening more often? What if you break down when the cons are there to see it and you can’t defend yourself?_ “The lesson I deserved for not remembering I get jumpy in tight closed spaces. It’s the headache that’s a bothersome Huttfucker.”

Zahara folds her arms over her breast, with a slight wince; there have to be bruises there, under her uniform. Jareth’s mouth goes damper with saliva and a bit more blood flows down to his cock, but that weak wave of arousal dies off under the look she fixes him with, hard and clinical and at the same time pitying. “Do you have any other symptom? Fatigue, inability to concentrate, problems sleeping…?”

A muscle in Jareth’s cheek pulls. “No.”

She raises an eyebrow. He fucking knows what that face means: _I know you’re a con, you’re trying to kriff me up, and it’s not working on me_. “One of your guards once let it slip he heard you scream in your sleep. More than once. So, do you mind telling me more about these nightmares?”

“Who’s the snitch?” The newbie, most likely. Armitage. Impressionable. _Doesn’t know how things work here_. Or Zook. _He’s gotten soft and this is his last tour of duty_ , _he thinks he doesn’t have anything left to lose_. Wembly, maybe? That fat old vulptex is getting even softer than Zook.

Zahara blinks, then steels herself back into prim-voiced professionalism. “I’m not breaking doctor-patient confidentiality for you. And I asked you a question, for the sake of your own health—”

“Who. Is. The snitch.”

The threat hangs between them like the stale smell of Jareth’s breath, while Zahara holds hers for a few, very long, seconds.

“I cannot tell you, Jareth; it’s against my regulations.” He knows that tone. The plea-and-bargain voice of a scared con trying to reason their way out. Von Longo giving him the same _c’mon, Cap, I’ve got two boys to feed_ tear-jerker banthashit his father sometimes tried on the cops—the last words Longo’s mouth uttered before Jareth’s fists battered it shut. “It is also against my regulations to leave you in pain, even if I personally would like you to suffer. So, please, can you just—”

“I outrank you, Doctor. Since you’re so fond of following the rules, here’s an order.” Jareth leans forward, his fists clenched on his lap, a vein pulsing on his temple and a faint, red-blooded ghost of migraine aura tingling around his head. “Tell me who the snitch is.”

“No, you don’t outrank me. I am not a member of Imperial Corrections. Unless you can get the warden to formally issue me that order, I’m not telling you.”

He leaps up, fast enough that she can’t back away, and grabs her chin again. Hard, this time.

Fear flashes across Zahara’s pretty face, but the crazy akk-bitch just can’t make things easy for him. She snatches Jareth’s wrist; he has to make an actual effort to keep his hand where it is. “What now,” she garbles through her squashed cheeks, “are you going to beat me to death if I don’t talk? You’ll only waste your time.”

“Want to try me, girl?”

“Just—just make sure you kill me right away. Or else, I swear that by the end of this rotation all Gen Pop will know exactly how _not long_ you last in bed.”

An angry hot wave washes over his neck and his face. His grip tightens; he can feel her teeth through the skin. “It’s a pity you’re resigning, Doc.” A smile creeps up on his mouth as her eyes widen in confusion. “Right when you’re starting to smarten up.”

He lets go of her. Bright red splotches mar the sides of her jaw where his fingers have dug in. The kind of sight that will make it worth playing through the pain for another ten standard days until Dr Cody leaves the _Purge_ , and the medidroid will finally be allowed to give him headache meds.

Zahara about-faces and trots to the door, holding the medkit to her chest like a prissy lady trying to protect her purse from pickpockets. She dives into the corridor without a look back. Beyond the closed door her footsteps bang down the corridor, fading into the imperceptible, bone-deep background thrum of the _Purge_ ’s lightspeed navigation.

Jareth stares at the void in the centre of his quarters, the mocking smile cracking off his face, one tooth at a time. The place stinks. The bed, the room. Himself. Sweaty skin, sweaty fabric, and sex. The perspiration has made his naked body cold like a corpse. Crossing his arms and rubbing hard on the clammy skin from his elbows to the shoulders, he heads to the ‘fresher. Bless the perks of the guards captain’s quarters: the shower has running hot water rather than just the sonic cleaner.

Eyes and mouth shut, he stands face-up under the warm spray—and gasps at the sudden stinging pains on his back, where the akk-bitch scratched him.

The pain and the steamy warmth that fills the shower cubicle trick his brain into recalling, in disgusting detail, the warm and round softness of her body pressed under—against—his. Heat and pressure pool, again, in his lower belly. Jareth props himself with both elbows against the water-streaked panel of cheap transpariplast and holds his head between his hands, massaging his temples where the migraine is drilling its way in. Brain, cock, skin, sweat glands, heart, stomach, lungs. His body is on a karking mass strike today.

The warm water lashes the abrasions on his back, trickles down his spine and his flanks like blood. For the hell of it, his brain digs out of a dark and putrid pit the tactile memory of having to dress up in the morning, the cleanest shirt Jareth had and put on to go to school, threadbare synthcotton that grated on the fresh welts on his back and arms like sandpaper.

With a growl, he pulls away from the transpariplast, now misty with condensation and looking as uncomfortably opaque as a cell door. As quick as he can before the water runs out and keeping his back out of the overhead spray, Jareth rinses his hair and the most offensively-smelling bends of his body. The showerhead sensor squawks out an angry sequence of beeps, which ricochets around his skull even after the water has shut off and he’s thrown a blind punch up at the showerhead. The component cracks and clatters down on the wet pavement.

Quiet, at last. But too late.

The brain echo of the beeping syncs up with the pulse of the headache as he hobbles out in a thin cloud of vapour, its damp warmth dissipating into the colder room temperature. Jareth reaches for the towel and wipes the front of his body and his legs dry, throws the synthfiber rag over his shoulders, and shuffles back to the bed.

He drops down to sit. The room keeps moving, as if he were sitting on a conveyor belt. In hindsight, it is a good thing he’s already barfed out the content of his stomach down in solitary. It would’ve been bloody worse, soiling and stinking up his quarters instead. And having the snitch hear him puke his guts out, in addition to screaming in his sleep. The bastard might as well be keeping tabs and reporting to the warden. Sure, they are all comrades in the mess hall and all Imperials in front of the cons, but Jareth hasn’t made it to captain by pretending backstabbers only exist in the Navy. The morons _he_ backstabbed should’ve known better.

Still, this—whatever’s going wrong with him—is worse than he imagined; the fact that he’s become a noisy sleeper is just another uncomfortable piece of evidence. Headaches, he can live with, or take painkillers, once Dr Cody is out of the way for good. The claustrophobia and the nightmares, he’s lived with throughout his whole life. But he hasn’t lost his poodoo so completely in a long time. Alone in the dark corridor with his throat full of vomit and a trapped animal slamming against his ribcage as it fought to burst free, he didn’t notice when his knees had given way and he’d sagged to the floor. His eyes saw his boots shaking in the dim light, and neither the boots nor the eyes were his. His lungs and larynx were short-circuited air scrubbers, stuck on a high-speed setting that brought but a trickle of oxygen in. The first thing that snapped him out of it had been the buzz of his comlink. Like a ghost contemplating the corpse he had just been ousted from, he watched his hand fumble for the comlink, nearly drop it, turn it on, heard his voice rasp some banthacrap in response to whatever the kriff ICO Austin wanted up in Gen Pop and _uh, Cap, is everything alright, you sound winded_.

Jareth shivers. What little thermal energy the shower offered him hasn’t taken long to figure out it didn’t like being stored in him, and flaked off toward entropy. Huddling the damp towel to his shoulders, he gropes around the mattress until he finds the shirt. His fist grabs onto a mass of moist fabric; with a grimace, he remembers what Zahara used the garment for, and lets go of it.

Then, after a few seconds’ hesitation, he picks it up. Slowly, he raises it to his nose, and inhales. Reek of sweat. A musky trace that is _not_ sweat. The guards and the cons aboard the _Purge_ would all blast each other with weapons set to kill, just to get a sniff at a rag that has touched her cunt. A part of Jareth estimates how many credits it would fetch, but the thought shoves itself away on its own. _It’s mine. Mine alone_.

He closes his eyes, spreads his legs, and imagines that his free hand, holding onto his cock and pumping, is hers.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Animal Impulses_ by IAMX.


End file.
